Eden

Eden (working title) is a geolocational iOS app for plant-based eating out in Ireland. Drawing its data from several sources, it aims to be the definitive guide for discovering vegan, vegetarian and gluten-free accommodating restaurants in the country. Currently in the early stages of development, it will be presented as my major project for the MSc in Creative Digital Media, DIT in 2018.

Initial Research

Early research has begun via interviews, surveys and card-sorting exercises in order to better understand user needs and values.

Participants were asked to delve into detail about the process of dining out on a plant-based diet, giving as much detail as possible about every step of the process.

Mental Model

From this initial research, a mental model was formed (which with each iteration will be updated).

Mental Model

Early Sketches

Search for a restaurant and plan a journey

User-generated content

Information Architecture

Below shows the most current diagram for the app's information architecture. The interface of the app will hinge on the Google Map's API to visualise JSON data received via AJAX from a noSQL server (Firebase). Several sources will be aggregated to create a database with all the required data, including third party API's to obtain images and data pulls from spreadsheets. Using automatic code runs, the database will be kept up to date along with the sources it obtains its information from.

The app will be built as a web application using Ionic and Angular 5 with TypeScript, before being deployed onto iOS with Cordova.